Recent college graduates are paying a price for entering the workforce in the shadow of a deep recession: Their wages are growing far more slowly than the U.S. average.

“The wage growth gap points to continued weakness in the overall labor market,” wrote San Francisco Fed economists Bart Hobijn and Leila Bengali in an Economic Letter released Monday by the regional reserve bank.

College graduates typically earn more and enjoy more job security than workers without a degree. The unemployment rate in June for workers over the age of 25 with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 3.3%, compared with 5% for all workers 25 years and older and 6.1% for all workers 16 and older, according to theLabor Department.

That’s what happened with the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. Mr. Hobijn and Ms. Bengali analyzed median weekly earnings for recent college graduates, defined as workers with a college degree between the ages of 21 and 25. They looked at wage growth in the years since 2007, rejiggering the calendar year to match the academic year at most colleges (so 2014 is May 2013 to April 2014).

From 2007 to 2014, the median weekly earnings of full-time U.S. workers rose 15%. Over the same period, the earnings of recent college graduates with full-time jobs rose just 5.9%. Both figures are unadjusted for inflation.

“With few exceptions, wage growth has been limited in all occupational groups for recent graduates,” the economists wrote, presenting “a clear pattern of low earnings growth for most categories.” The wage gap has been larger and more persistent than in past recessions, which they attributed to underlying weakness in the economy.

It’s not as though the rest of the workforce has been seeing especially robust wage growth, either. Average hourly earnings for all U.S. private-sector workers rose 2% in June from a year earlier, in line with the trend of recent years and roughly on par with rising prices in recent months.

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